


of nightmares and souls

by peppermintcas



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 22:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3184970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppermintcas/pseuds/peppermintcas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles gets philosophical after good sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	of nightmares and souls

**Author's Note:**

> Set after X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Charles gets philosophical after good sex.

He’s lying on Erik’s chest, eyes closed, fingers dancing patterns up the other man’s sternum, over his collarbones, over the hollow at the base of his throat. Erik allows it—only because while Charles gets philosophical post-coitus, Erik gets sentimental. He catches Charles’ fingers, laces them with his, and brings them to his lips. 

Charles exhales thoughtfully. “Bookends of the same soul,” he says.

“What?”

“We’re like—” Charles gestures, somewhat uselessly, bracketing his hands around—something. “Bookends. The things. Those _things_ you put at the end of a row of books to keep them upright. We’re like those. The drastically different ends of the same soul. We’re so different, Erik, have you ever thought about it?”

“Daily,” Erik says drily, carding his fingers through soft brown hair. Charles has cut it, he notes. The morose, longer locks from the brief stint as a drunken stoner have disappeared. Hank probably told him to get it cut.

“He did, actually,” Charles says. “He said it would scare the students. And to be fair, it was hardly brief.”

Erik laughs. “Bookends,” he prompts, because he’s curious to see where Charles is going to take this.

“Right,” Charles says, resuming his lazy sprawl across Erik’s chest. He tugs their joined hands down to where he can study their intertwined fingers. “We’re so incredibly different—you probably go around and start terrorist groups for fun—”

“I do not,” Erik grumbles, because he doesn’t, and Charles knows it, and he's deliberately being a shit about it.

“—and I’m a wheelchair-bound professor running a mutants' school, for God’s sake. Our notions, our ideals, are so _radically_ different. We can’t agree on one thing in politics, we argue all the time, and nothing about our relationship is—no one would call this healthy." Charles tilts his head up to study Erik in that intensely scrutinizing way that makes him want to squirm, and his eyes are soft. "But we're here."

Erik inhales.

"We're here," Charles continues, not taking his eyes off of Erik's. "Despite all of that. You're still coming around to the school every week, and we're still sleeping in the same bed, and I—" he swallows, eyes flickering down, away. "I swore after Cuba that I wouldn't let it happen again."

He exhales. Long, slow.

Because they had done this, before. It had been inevitable, Erik thinks. It was inevitable that they would give in to—to the thing that was building, that had been building since Charles pulled him out of the water, since Charles looked him dead in the eye and told him, boldly, carelessly, that he knew everything about him. That had been building and building during that road trip, recruiting mutants for the CIA or for Cerebro (or, as Erik pessimistically believed, for registration), that had built during the long trip through Russia to that Soviet leader's house, that had built and built and built until it finally collapsed when Charles pushed aside Erik's nightmares one day at Westchester and traded them in for a kiss.

He had woken, shuddering, from a nightmare that had involved an—an _incident_ , from when he was a child, still at the mercy of Shaw's scalpel. The details of the dream are slipping away, thank God—but that lingering terror is still there. That fear that someone is going to take him and slice him open and experiment with him, pulling and poking and prodding until he cries out, the _pain_ , the _helplessness_ —

Charles had come running. He was projecting, Charles told him, breathing hard. He was projecting his emotions across the entire wing of the mansion, was he okay, was he okay, what had happened. Was he alright.

Erik, true to form, had brushed it off. "It's nothing," he said roughly, pushing his hair back, swinging his legs off of the bed and reaching for a pair of sweatpants. "Just a dream. I'm perfectly fine."

And Charles had—he had crossed the room in several swift strides, expressionless, concentrating. He stood in front of Erik, still seated on the bed, tilted his head, said, softly: "Erik, he—he doesn't control you anymore. You know that."

"No," Erik said. He breathed, deep. "But it feels like it."

"Erik, _no one_ can control you," Charles said, earnest. His hands were in his pockets, and he was rocking forward on the balls of his feet, as if to try and convey what he was saying, the truth of his words.

"I _know_ that," Erik said. "I know. But it's hard to just—shake off a feeling that has been a straightforward fact for almost a third of your lifetime." He shook his head. "The nightmares are always worse when I'm tired. I'll get more sleep tonight, and they won't bother you again."

"It's not a matter of whether they bother me or not," Charles said, watching Erik reach across the bed to grab a sweatshirt. "It's about you. You should have come to me. I could have helped."

He paused, then, hesitant. "Let me help you," he said gently.

And Erik shouldn't have given in. It was a moment of weakness, he told himself later, when the helmet was firmly on his head and all thoughts of regret were roughly shoved into the deepest recesses of his mind. It was weakness. Stupidity.

It was—

It was the way Charles' hand had slid, warm and large, onto his cheekbone, ghosting over his temple. It was the bright gleam that chased all memories of Shaw deep into his mind, clearing the cobwebs of the nightmare away, snapping those goddamned scalpels in half and leaving them shattered in a prison cell of memories. It was how they gravitated towards each other in that brief moment of clarity—Charles, leaning forward, falling, Erik tilting his head upwards, his own hands finding their way to Charles' sweater vest—he had spared a moment to think  _what kind of ridiculous person wore sweater vests, honestly_ —pulling him in. Pulling him forward.

It was the moment they first found each other, all over again.

Stupidity.

Charles is watching him, now, his blue eyes shuttered, almost closed with exhaustion. Not stupidity, Erik corrects himself, gazing down at the beautiful man curled into his side, those sharp blue eyes, those deft hands, curled over his own, that beautiful, beautiful mind. Never stupidity.

"We bracket such different ends of the shelves," Charles muses. He laughs, his voice thick and tired. "What a ridiculous analogy. I'll have to come up with a better one."

**Author's Note:**

> I just watched X-Men this week, and Christ. _"I want you by my side?"_ Please. I'm gonna puke.


End file.
